Space-compatible cavity-enhanced single-photon generation with hexagonal boron nitride

Tobias Vogl, Ruvi Lecamwasam, Ben C. Buchler, Yuerui Lu, Ping Koy Lam

Published 2019-02-08Version 1

Sources of pure and indistinguishable single-photons are critical for near-future optical quantum technologies. Recently, color centers hosted by two-dimensional hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) have emerged as a promising platform for high luminosity room temperature single-photon sources. Despite the brightness of the emitters, the spectrum is rather broad and the single-photon purity is not sufficient for practical quantum information processing. Here, we report integration of such a quantum emitter hosted by hBN into a tunable optical microcavity. A small mode volume of the order of $\lambda^3$ allows us to Purcell enhance the fluorescence, with the observed excited state lifetime shortening. The cavity significantly narrows the spectrum and improves the single-photon purity by suppression of off-resonant noise. We explore practical applications by evaluating the performance of our single-photon source for quantum key distribution and quantum computing. The complete device is compact and implemented on a picoclass satellite platform, enabling future low-cost satellite-based long-distance quantum networks.